Pivotal Cloud Foundry: Two Tiles Are Better Than One

September 11 2018
 

AppDynamics now offers two distinct Service Broker tiles on the Pivotal Network, bringing significant enhancements to our customers who monitor apps on PCF.


In an earlier blog in our series on monitoring applications deployed to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) platform, my colleague Jeff Holmes described how AppDynamics provides an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard for a single view of all your key performance indicators for system health and availability. This broke new ground and has been warmly welcomed by our many customers who rely on PCF to run their business applications. One enhancement request we heard from several customers was that they wanted to separate the task of configuring their APM agents from that of setting up the infrastructure monitoring. That made sense, and so we now offer two distinct Service Broker tiles on the Pivotal Network:

  1. AppDynamics Application Monitoring for PCF provides a single, convenient way to configure APM agents in all the various buildpacks that might deploy to PCF. It allows you to define different configurations for multiple environments (e.g., dev/test/stage) and also configure AppDynamics Transaction Analytics to take advantage of our unique Business iQ platform.

  2. AppDynamics Platform Monitoring for PCF is where you go to set up infrastructure monitoring with all the KPI dashboard, health rules and alerting that Jeff describes in his blog. For advanced users, it also allows you to configure exactly how AppDynamics will fetch those KPI metrics from the Loggregator system.

There are at least a couple of reasons why this is an ideal duo. The first is that now you can choose exactly which Service Broker functionality you need for a given environment. If you only need to deploy our APM agents into a dev/test environment and don’t need platform monitoring capabilities, you can deploy only the first tile. In production environments, you would deploy both.

The second reason, although less obvious, is also important. By separating out the tiles in this way, we can make them much more lightweight—a significant benefit, particularly for those customers who routinely deploy multiple Service Broker tiles. In fact, the two new tiles together are now an order of magnitude smaller than the original, single tile.

There are some important changes under the hood as well. We no longer need to deploy an instance of the AppDynamics Machine Agent to host the custom nozzle implementation that we use to gather KPI metrics from the Loggregator. Instead, we have a small, lightweight agent written in Go (to match the Loggregator libraries from Pivotal that are part of the core platform). This agent uses our libagent shared library to connect to the AppDynamics controller. The result is a small, highly performant nozzle that is closely aligned with Cloud Foundry’s metrics and logging systems.

We’ve already received great feedback from early adopters, and we believe this is something that our many customers who use AppDynamics to monitor apps on PCF will want to check out. Upgrading from previous versions of the AppDynamics Service Broker Tile is simple, too. The new tiles are available from the Pivotal Network and there is full documentation on our Pivotal Partner Docs site. This definitely is a case where two tiles are better than one!

AppDynamics Application Monitoring for PCF
Download: https://network.pivotal.io/products/p-appdynamics
Docs: https://docs.pivotal.io/partners/appdynamics/index.html

AppDynamics Platform Monitoring for PCF
Download: https://network.pivotal.io/products/appdynamics-platform
Docs: https://docs.pivotal.io/partners/appdynamics-platform/index.html

 

Mark Prichard
Senior Director of Product Management at AppDynamics

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